Split-scope effects in definite descriptions by Dylan Bumford A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics New York University May, 2017 Chris Barker Acknowledgments I have a lot of people to thank for this dissertation. The following diagram of my social network may prove useful. People who do Chris, Anna, Simon, Sara, James, Maggie, People who are linguistics from Texas Philippe, Adrian, Nestor, Liz, Ivo, Joey, Itamar, Vera, James, Joey, Lindsey, Marshal, Nicole, Linmin, Katie, Michael, Dane, Emily, K.C., Salvador, Tim, Rick, Scott, Gina, Jeremy, James, Lelia, Courtney, Ashley, Prerna, David, Hans Janie, Mom, Dad This dissertation is in many ways a tribute to my committee. Anna taught me about superlatives and quantifiers, Chris about scope, split scope, and parasitic scope, Philippe presuppositions, then Adrian postsuppositions, and Simon all the while about dynamic semantics. I mostly just stirred. I owe Chris Barker an unimaginable debt for the time and energy he has given me from the mo- ment I arrived at NYU, for his teaching, reading, commenting, and coauthoring, for the food, the beer, and the friendship, for the good advice and the good words he has put in on my behalf, and for the continuous illustration of how to be a semanticist. Anna Szabolcsi kept me empirically honest throughout the project, and has always helped me to situate my thoughts in the vast landscape of what is known about language. Philippe led six semantics seminars during my time in New York. I ii attended all of them, and would attend all future iterations of them if I could. His energy and willing- ness to think very carefully about virtually anything are astounding, and I have learned much more than I ever intended to as a result. Inexplicably, Adrian Brasoveanu has always responded to me in pure tones of cheer and encouragement, no matter how many papers I write that betray deep misun- derstandings of his work. Easily half of the ideas I’ve had in graduate school are direct consequences of studying analyses that he has published. The other half I got from Simon Charlow. Simon has been many things to me, first a fellow student, then a teacher, a member of my committee, a collaborator, now a fellow assistant professor, but always a mentor, and always a friend. Honestly it would be hard to overestimate how much of what I know about semantics, I know because Simon explained it to me somewhere between a bar and a gchat window. Suffice it to say I could never have written this dissertation without his guidance. For five years at NYU, I shared an office with Itamar Kastner, Vera Zu, and James Whang. It was basically a roadtrip. They are my lifelines in all things non-semantic, linguistic or otherwise, and I hope they know how much I have always appreciated their expertise, and much more than that, their company. I am grateful also to the rest of my cohort, Nicole Holliday, Katie Wallace, K.C. Lin, and Linmin Zhang for their camaraderie and commisery. I came to NYU in no small part to take advantage of the students already doing syntax and seman- tics there. Salvador Mascarenhas, Neil Myler, and Jeremy Kuhn in particular taught me an enormous amount. And though I hardly knew him, much of my own research is inspired by the collected unpub- lished works of Mike Solomon, works that still haunt various NYU servers and gmail accounts. So thanks Mike. Tim Leffel told me that New York would be a great place to spend my 20s, and that has proved to be about as true as anything anyone ever told me. Stephanie Harves and Lucas Champol- lion provided financial support over several summers. In my fourth year, I was fortunate enough to spend a semester at Stanford, where I benefited from conversations with many people, but especially with James Collins, Lelia Glass, and Prerna Nadathur. iii Before Stanford and NYU, there was UT. David Beaver and Hans Kamp introduced me to se- mantics, and encouraged me to pursue it. It is thanks to them that I am in a position to write these acknowledgments at all. David took me under the wing of his lab, and showed me what research in linguistics could be. Hans gave me my first taste of dynamic semantics, and then advised my kooky, shapeshifting undergraduate thesis with heart and aplomb. To both of them I can only offer my sin- cerest thanks, which together with a few hundred thousand dollars ought to cover the six years of private education in New York City that their recommendation letters were worth. Also at UT, I met the friends that would become my family for the next ten years and climbing, across two and now maybe three different states. Grad school can be a rough landing, and very few incoming students have the luxury of a dozen charming, creative Texas expats on their plane. So to Sara, James, Maggie, Nestor, Liz, Ivo, Joey, Joey, Lindsey, Marshal, young Michael and Michael the return of Michael, Dane, Emily, and Rick, y’all have been a constant source of joy and stability in my life, and I could never thank you enough. Liz Wong gets a special shout out for her pioneering work at the margins of natural spoken English. Most theoretical linguists have to synthesize sentences in laboratories with expensive mental equipment, but I have Liz. Thanks to the Parks for the warmth, generosity, and kindness they have shown me over the years. Thanks to my sister and to my parents for supporting me without hesitation or reserve, despite the obviously weird choices I have made, and for having the confidence in me that I have never quite mustered myself. Finally, of course, thanks to Ashley. I wouldn’t know where to start without you. iv Abstract This dissertation argues for a specific semantic decomposition of morphological definiteness. I pro- pose that the meaning of ‘the’ comprises two distinct compositional operations. The first builds a set of witnesses that satisfy the restricting noun phrase. The second tests this set for uniqueness. The motivation for decomposing the denotation of the definite determiner in this way comes from split- scope intervention effects. The two components — the selection of witnesses on the one hand and the counting of witnesses on the other — may take effect at different points in the composition of a constituent, and this has non-trivial semantic consequences when other operators inside the deter- miner phrase take action in between them. In particular, I analyze well-known examples of mutually recursive definite descriptions like ‘the rabbit in the hat’ (when there are two rabbits and two hats but only one rabbit in a hat and only one hat with a rabbit in it) as examples of definites whose referent- introducing and referent-testing components are interleaved rather than nested. I further demonstrate that this picture leads to a new theory of so-called relative superlative de- scriptions like ‘the kid who climbed the highest tree’ (when there is no highest tree, per se, only a highest tree-climbing kid), which explains the previously mysterious role of the definite determiner in licensing such readings. Building on this approach to superlatives, I develop a split-scope treatment of focus-marking and show that certain interpretations of exclusive adjectives may also be character- ized as relative readings. Finally, I present new data based on binding patterns in definite and pos- sessive descriptions that provide evidence for scope-theoretic treatments of relative readings, and especially for the analysis described in this dissertation according to which relative readings are a consequence of delayed evaluation of determiners. v Contents Acknowledgments ii Abstract v List of Figures ix 1 Introduction 1 2 Polyadicities in definite description 10 2.1 Introduction ........................................ 10 2.2 Data ............................................ 15 2.2.1 Essential empirical pattern ............................ 15 2.2.2 Definiteness effects ................................ 17 2.2.3 Intensional environments ............................ 18 2.2.4 Scope islands ................................... 20 2.2.5 Possessive DPs .................................. 22 2.2.6 Summary of data ................................. 24 2.3 Analysis .......................................... 24 2.3.1 Core proposal ................................... 24 2.3.2 Haddock definites, singular and plural ..................... 25 2.3.3 Numerals ..................................... 33 2.3.4 Superlatives .................................... 35 vi 2.4 Discussion and comparison ................................ 41 2.4.1 The scope vs. restriction superlative debate .................. 41 2.4.2 Haddock effects .................................. 44 2.4.3 Synthesizing intuitions .............................. 49 2.4.4 Other points of comparison ........................... 54 2.5 Conclusion ......................................... 61 3 Exclusive descriptions and split-scope focus 62 3.1 Introduction ........................................ 62 3.2 Data ............................................ 64 3.2.1 Indeterminate exclusives ............................. 64 3.2.2 Relative exclusives ................................ 66 3.2.3 Many indeterminate readings are relative readings .............. 71 3.2.4 Summary ..................................... 72 3.3 Towards an analysis: ‘The only’ = ‘the’ + ‘only’ ...................... 74 3.3.1 Coppock & Beaver 2015 ............................. 74 3.3.2 Sharvit 2015 ................................... 75 3.3.3 Review of Chapter 2 ..............................